Plainview school board hears demographic study

Published 7:00 pm, Friday, September 25, 2009

The Plainview school district has some unique characteristics that could impact its future, according to representatives from Population and Survey Analysts of College Station.

The firm made a presentation to the PISD school board about its findings in a demographic study Tuesday night at the Education Complex.

Wes Naron and Adam Soto both were out of town, but Naron participated in the presentation through the Internet via cell phone. Brandon Brownlee missed a portion of the meeting due to a family conflict.

PASA was commissioned earlier this year by the school board to conduct an in-depth demographic study to help the school district and community with long-term planning. Because of the scope of the study, the City of Plainview agreed to pay $5,000 toward the approximate $39,000 cost.

The company provided preliminary data to the district which was presented at the August board meeting.

On Tuesday night, Dr. Pat Guseman and attorney Kris Pool, both with PASA, offered a more detailed presentation. The preliminary summary included three options based on the findings of the report.

The first option presented data that assumes the district does not use any portable buildings; that the grade groupings are early childhood-fifth grade, sixth-eighth grade and ninth-12th grade; and that a new high school is built. The existing high school would be used partially as a middle school and partially as administrative offices, allowing the district to sell some of the extra buildings it now uses.

In that scenario, Lakeside, Ash and Estacado would be used as elementary schools and Coronado would be used as a middle school because it has a larger capacity than Estacado.

Option 2 assumes the same grade-level groupings, but allows the district to use portables and does not include a new high school. Ash and Lakeside would become elementary schools and Coronado and Estacado would be middle schools.

Option 3 left Ash as a middle school, and none of the options include the current four single-grade campus system.

In Option 1, Thunderbird is over capacity at 101 percent in 2012 and 102 percent in 2019.

In Option 2, Thunderbird again is over capacity, as is Ash. Ash is at 111 percent capacity in 2012 and 114 percent capacity by 2019. In this option, Coronado is over capacity at 116 percent in 2012 and 110 percent by 2019, while Estacado is over capacity in 2015 at 102 percent.

In the third option, Thunderbird is swamped at 143 percent capacity in 2012 and 146 percent capacity by 2019.

Lakeside comes in at 112 percent capacity in 2012 and 115 percent in 2019, and La Mesa has 101 percent capacity in 2012 and is up to 112 percent by 2019.

In presenting the 327-page report Tuesday night, Guseman told the board that PASA developed both a conservative viewpoint and a high-growth viewpoint.

For the purposes of long-term planning, she said, the firm based its recommendations off of the conservative viewpoint because they don't want to do anything that would lead a district to "overbuild."

Based on that conservative scenario, Guseman said over the next 10 years the school district is expected to lose students, but not at a rate that would undermine the validity of the recommendations.

In fact, she said, Plainview has shown factors over the past year that would suggest the high-growth scenario as being legitimate.

Specifically, she said, the district is up in student population in the lower grades.

At the same time, the community has seen a spurt of growth in employment that correlates with that growth in student population.

Finally, Guseman said, there has been a trend in growth of kindergarten-aged students over the past few years and that, traditionally, has been a strong indication of a growth scenario.

In general terms, she and Pool said, the community and the school district appear to be stable.

As far as the unique features of Plainview, Guseman said the community falls in between urban and rural. With the city and the surrounding rural development that falls under the school district, PISD has numbers that move it toward an urban district in size.

"You've got a humongous school district," she said.

As of Tuesday, PISD's total enrollment is 5,780.

The other thing that jumped out to the team doing the research and preparing the final report is that Plainview has an unusually large commercial tax base because of its large private employers such as the Wal-Mart Distribution Center and Cargill Meat Solutions.

In fact, she said, it is the largest her firm had dealt with that wasn't government-subsidized, such as those in Lubbock with Texas Tech University and the Health Sciences Center.

(The Herald has requested a copy of the 327-page study, which should be available by next week. The Herald is planning a number of stories based on the findings of the study.)